The Canopy Of Time Part 9

The Galactic Minister seated himself, motioning Farro into an adjoining seat.

"What is this apparatus?" Farro asked, unable to keep a slight tinge of anxiety from his tone.

"It is a type of wave-synthesizer. In effect, it renders down many of the wavelengths which man cannot detect by himself, translating them into paraphrased terms which he can. At the same time, it feeds in objective and subjective impressions of the universe. That is to say, you will experience-when you fit the mask and I switch on-instrumental recordings of the universe (visual and aural and so on) as well as human impressions of it.

"I should warn you that owing to your lack of train-ing, you may unfortunately gather a rather confused impression from the synthesizer. All the same, I fancy that it will give you a better rough idea of what the galaxy is like than you would get from a long star journey."

"Let's go," Farro said, clutching his cold hands to-gether.

Now the entire column of lemmings had embarked into the still water. They swam smoothly and silently, their communal wake soon dissolving into the grandly gentle motion of the sea. Gradually the column attenu-ated as the stronger animals drew further ahead and the weaker ones dropped behind. One by one, inevitably, these weaker animals drowned; yet until their sleek heads finally disappeared below the surface, they still pressed forward with bulging eyes fixed upon the far and empty horizon.

No human spectator, however devoid of anthropo-morphic feeling, could have failed to ask himself: what might be the nature of the goal that prompted such a sacrifice?

The inside of the mask was cold. It fitted loosely over his face, covering his ears and leaving only the back of his head free. Again a touch of unreasoning fear shot through him.

"The switch is by your hand," the Minister said. "Press it."

Farro pressed the switch. Darkness submerged him.

"I am with you," the Minister said steadily. "I have a mask on too, and can see and feel what you do."

A spiral was curling out into the darkness, boring its way through nothing: an opaque, smothering nothing as warm as flesh. Materializing from the spiral issued a growing cl.u.s.ter of bubbles, dark as polyhedric grapes, multiplying and multiplying as if breathed from an inexhaustible bubble pipe. The lights on their surfaces, glittering, changing, spun a misty web which gradually veiled the operation.

"Cells are being formed, beaten out in endless dup-lication on the microscopic anvils of creation. You witness the beginning of a new life," Jandanagger said, his voice sounding distant.

Like a curtain by an open window, the cells trembled behind their veil, awaiting life. And the moment of its coming was not perceptible. It was only that now the veil had something to conceal within itself; its trans-lucence dimmed, its surface patterned, a kind of blind purpose shaped it into more definite outline.

No longer was it beautiful.

Consciousness simmered inside it, a pinpoint of instinct-plus without love or knowledge, an eye trying to see through a lid of skin. It was not inert; instead, it struggled on the verge of terror, undergoing the trauma of coming-into-being, fighting, scrabbling, lest it fell back again into the endless gulf of not-being.

"Here is the Afterlife your religions tell of," Jandanagger's voice said. "This is the purgatory every one of us must undergo, only it comes not after but before life. The spirit that will become us has to tread the billion years of the past before it reaches the present it can be born into. One might almost say there was something it had to expiate."

The foetus was all Farro's universe; it filled the mask, filled him. He suffered with it, for it obviously suffered. Pressures wracked it, the irremediable pressures of time and biochemistry, the pain of which it strove to lessen by changing shape. It writhed from worm- to slug-hood, it grew gills and a tail. Fishlike, and then no longer fish-like, it toiled up the steep slope of evolution, mouselike, pig-like, apelike, babylike.

"This is the truth the wisest man forgets: that he has done all this."

Now the environment changed. The foetus, exerting itself, had become a baby, and the baby could only become a man by the proddings of a thousand new stimuli. And all these stimuli, animal, vegetable, or mineral, lived too, in their different way. They com-peted. They inflicted constant challenges on the man creature; some of them, semi-sentient, invaded his flesh and bred there, creating their own life cycles; others, non-sentient, were like waves that pa.s.sed unceasingly through his mind and his body. He seemed hardly an ent.i.ty, merely a focal point of forces, constantly threatened with dissolution.

So complete was the identification between the image and the receiver, that Farro felt he was the man.

He recognized that everything happening to the man hap-pened to him; he sweated and writhed like the foetus, conscious of the salt water in his blood, the unstoppable rays in the marrow of his bones. Yet the mind was freer than it had been in the foetus stage; during the wrenching moment of fear when environments had changed, the eye of consciousness had opened its lids.

"And now the man changes environments again, to venture away from his own planet," the Galactic Minis-ter said.

But s.p.a.ce was not s.p.a.ce as Farro had reckoned it. It struck his eyes like slate: not a simple nothingness, but an unfathomable web of forces, a creeping blend of stresses and fields in which stars and planets hung like dew amid spiders' webs. No life was here, only the same interaction of planes and pressures that had attended the man all along, and of which even the man himself was composed. None the less, his perceptions reached a new stage, the light of consciousness burnt more steadily.

Again he was reaching out, swimming towards the confines of his galaxy. About him, proportions changed, slid, dwindled. In the beginning, the womb had been everywhere, equipped with all the menace and coercion of a full-scale universe; now the galaxy was revealed as smaller than the womb-a pint-sized goldfish bowl in which a tiddler swam, unaware of the difference between air and water. For there was no spanning the gulfs between galaxies: there lay nothing, the nothing of an unremitting Outside.

And the man had never met nothing before. Freedom was not a condition he knew because it did not exist in his interpenetrated existence.

As he swam up to the surface, something stirred be-yond the yellow rim of the galaxy. The something could hardly be seen; but it was there on the Outside, wakeful and clawed, a creature with senses though insensate. It registered half as sight, half as noise: a smouldering and delayed series of pops, like the sound of bursting arteries. It was big. Farro screamed into the blackness of his mask at its bigness and its anger.

The creature was waiting for the man. Stretching it stretched right round the galaxy, round the goldfish bowl, its supernatant bat's wings groping for purchase.

Farro screamed again.

"I'm sorry," he said weakly, as he felt the Minister removing his mask for him, "I'm sorry."

The Minister patted his shoulder. Shuddering, Farro buried his face in his hands, trying to erase the now loathsome contact of the mask. That thing beyond the galaxy-it seemed to have entered and found a per-manent place in his mind.

At last, gathering himself together, he stood up. Weak-ness floated in every layer of him. Moistening his lips, he spoke.

"So you inveigle us into the Federation to face that!"

Jandanagger took his arm.

"Come back to my room. There is a point I can now make clear to you which I could not before: Earth has not been inveigled into the Federation. With your Earthbound eyes, I know how you see the situation. You fancy that despite the evidence before your eyes of Galactic superiority, there must be some vital point on which Earth can offer something unbeatable. You fancy there must be some factor for which we need terrestrial help-a factor it does not yet suit us to reveal; isn't that so?"

Farro avoided the other's narrow eyes as they ascended in a lift to the top of the building.

"There are other things beside the material ones," he said evasively. "Think for instance of the great heritage of literature in the world; to a truly civilized race, that might appear invaluable."

"That depends upon what you mean by civilized. The senior races of the galaxy, having lost the taste for the spectacle of mental suffering, would be unlikely to find much attraction in your literatures."

This gently administered rebuke silenced Farro. After a pause, the Galactic Minister continued, "No, you have no secret virtues, alas, for which we are gulling you into the Federation. The boot is on the other foot. We are taking you in as a duty, because you need looking after. I apologize for putting the matter so bluntly; but such may be the best way."

Stopping gently, the lift released them into the boomerang-shaped room. In a minute, they were speed-ing back to the building Farro had first entered, with the crowded Horby Glive sector below them.

Farro closed his eyes, still feeling sick and shattered. The implica-tions of what Jandanagger had said were momentarily beyond his comprehension.

"I understand nothing," he said. "I don't understand why it should be your duty to look after Earth."

"Then already you do begin to understand," Jandanagger said, and for the first time personal warmth tempered his voice. "For not only are our sciences beyond yours, so are our philosophies and thought dis-ciplines. All our mental abilities have been keyed semantically into the language in which you have learnt to converse with me, Galingua."

The flying room was reabsorbed; they became again merely one leaf-tip of a giant building growing towards the grey clouds, "Yoar language is certainly comprehensive and com-plex," Farro said, "but perhaps my knowledge of it is too elementary for me to recognize the extra significance of which you speak."

"That is only because you have still to be shown how Galingua is more than a language: it is a way of life, our means of s.p.a.ce travel itself! Concentrate on what I am telling you, Mr. Westerby."

Confusedly, Farro shook his head as the other spoke; blood seemed to be congesting at the base of his skull. The odd idea came to him that he was losing his character, his ident.i.ty. Wisps of meaning, hints of a greater comprehension, blew through his brain like streamers in the draught of a fan. As he tried to settle them, keep them steady, his own language became less like the bedrock of his being; his knowledge of Galingua, coupled with the experiences of the last hour, gradually a.s.sumed a dominant tone. With Jandanagger's grave eyes upon him, he began to think in the tongue of the galaxy.

For Jandanagger was talking, and with increasing rapidity. Although his meanings seemed clear, it felt to Farro as if they were being comprehended only by a level below his conscious one. It was like partial drunkenness, when the grand simplicities of the world are revealed in wine and the mind skates over the thin ice of experience.

For Jandanagger was talking of many things at once, shifting things that could not be spoken of in terrestrial tongues, dissolving mental disciplines never formulated through terrestrial voices. Yet all these things balanced together in one sentence like jugglers' b.a.l.l.s, enhancing each other.

For Jandanagger was talking of only one thing: the thrust of creation. He spoke of what the synthesizer had demonstrated: that man was never a separate ent.i.ty, merely a solid within a solid-or better still, a flux within a flux. That he had only a subjective ident.i.ty. That the wheeling matter of the galaxy was one with him.

And he spoke in the same breath of Galingua, which was merely a vocal representation of that flux, and whose cadences followed the great spiral of life within the flux. As he spoke, he unlocked the inner secret of it to Farro, so that what before had been a formal study became an orchestration, with every cell another note.

With a wild exultation, Farro was able to answer now, merging with the spiral of talk. The new language was like a great immaterial stupa, its base broad, rooted in the ground of the ego, its spire high, whirling up into the sky. And by it, Farro gradually ascended with Jandan-agger: or rather, the proportions and perspectives about him changed, slid, dwindled, as they had done in the synthesizer. With no sense of alarm, he found himself high above the gaping crowds, shooting upwards on an etheric spiral.

Within him was a new understanding of the stresses permeating all s.p.a.ce. He rode upwards through the planes of the universe, Jandanagger close by, sharing the revelation; Now it was clear why the Galactics needed few s.p.a.ce ships: their big polygonal vessels carried only material; man himself had found a safer way of travelling in the goldfish bowl of the galaxy.

Looking outwards, Farro saw where the stars thinned. Out there was the thing with claws, popping silently like bursting blood-vessels. Fear came to him again.

"The thing is the synthesizer. . . ." he said to Jandan-agger, through the new-found medium of communica-tion. "The thing that surrounds the galaxy-if man can never get out, cannot it get in at us?"

For a long minute Jandanagger was silent, searching for the key phrases of explanation.

"You have learnt as much as you have very rapidly," he said. "By not-understanding and then by well-under-standing, you have made yourself one of the true citizens of the galaxy. But you have only taken leap X; now you must leap X10. Prepare yourself."

"I am prepared."

"All that you have learnt is true. Yet there is a far greater truth, a truer truth. Nothing exists in the ultimate sense: all is illusion, a two-dimensional shadow play on the mist of s.p.a.ce-time. Yinnisfar itself means 'illusion'."

"But the clawed thing. . . ."

The clawed thing is why we fare ever further ahead into the illusion of s.p.a.ce. It is real. Only the galaxy as you previously misinterpreted it is unreal, being but a configuration of mental forces. That monster, that thing you sensed, is the residue of the slime of the evolutionary pest still lingering-not outside you!-but in your own mind. It is from that we must escape. We must grow from it."

More explanation followed, but it was beyond Farro. In a flash, he saw that Jandanagger, with an eagerness to experiment, had driven him too far and too fast. He could not make the last leap; he was falling back, topp-ling into not-being. Somewhere within him, the pop-thud-pop sound of bursting arteries began. Others would succeed where he had failed-but meanwhile, the angry claws were reaching from the heavens for him, to sunder, not to rescue.

And now the lemmings were scattered over a con-siderable area of sea. Few of the original column were left; the remaining swimmers, isolated from each other, were growing tired. Yet they pressed forward as doggedly as ever towards the unseen goal.

Nothing was ahead of them. They had launched themselves into a vast-but not infinite-world without landmarks. The cruel incentive urged them always on. And if an invisible spectator had asked himself the agonized "why?" to it all, an answer might have occurred to him: that these creatures were not heading for some especial promise in their future, but merely fleeing from some terrible fear in their past.

As the brief centuries pa.s.sed, the world once known as Earth was conquered by commerce, its att.i.tudes insen-sibly undergoing a modification in the process. Then came the blow that forced man to alter his att.i.tude to himself. His metaphysical view of being had of course been constantly subject to change; now the terrible moment arrived when he was revealed to himself in an entirely new light, as an alien, as a hostile environment.

Gene Hive.

It was one of those unlikely accidents which is likely to occur anywhere. The undersea trawler Bartlemeo was approaching the sub-port of Capverde at four hundred and ninety fathoms when it developed engine trouble. I am not a technical man, so that I cannot exactly describe the fault; apparently uranium slugs move slowly through the piles of these ships, and the dispensing mechanism which shoots the used slugs into the separa-tors became jammed. Instead of using manual remote control to tackle the fault, the chief engineer, a man called Je Regard, went in himself to clear the slug-way. As he climbed through the inspection hatches, Regard snagged his protective suit on a latch without noticing it. He was able to repair the congestion in the slug-way without trouble, but collapsed as he emerged again, hav-ing collected a near-lethal dose of radiation in his kidneys.

The Bartlemeo carried no doctor. A general call for one was sent out straight away.

I have said I am no technician; neither am I a philo-sopher. Yet I can see in this trivial episode which began so many centuries of trouble the pattern of all great things which start as something fairly insignificant: "big oaks from little acorns grow"; you know what I mean.

In the midst of the shifting and immemorial sands of the Sara desert crouches the Ahaggari plateau, breasting the dunes like a liner in a sullen sea. On the edge of the plateau stands Barbe Barber, the Inst.i.tute of Medical Meditation, an elaborate and ancient building in the grand fifty-first epoch manner, as fugal as Angkor Wat, as uncompromising as the Lunar Enterventual. Set about with palms which lend shade to its wide, paved walks, Barbe Barber thrusts its towers and upper stories above the trees to scan the mighty continent in which it stands -just as its occupants, the doctors, scan the interior of the body, the inner continent of man.

Gerund Gyres, neck cloth perpetually mopping his brow, stood before the main steps of the inst.i.tute, wait-ing. His plane which had brought him here stood some distance away in the park. He waited humbly in the rocking heat, although he was a proud man: no layman was ever allowed in Barbe Barber.

At length the figure Gerund expected to see appeared at the top of the wide steps. It was his wife, Cyro.

She turned back, as if to bid someone behind her farewell, and then commenced to descend the steps.

As always when Gerund met her here, he was conscious of how Gyro, as she came down those steps, had to force her mind out from the cloister of Barbe Barber back into the external world. While he watched with anxiety and love, the curve of her back straightened, her head came up, her pace increased. By the time she reached Gerund, her eyes held that familiar expression of detached amuse-ment with which she faced both life and her husband.

"It feels like weeks since I saw you," Gyro said, kissing Gerund on his mouth and putting her arms round him.

"It is weeks," he protested.

"Is it really?" she said playfully. "It doesn't seem as long!"

Gerund took her hand and led her round to the ma.s.sive triangle that was their plane. The month of medita-tion which Gyro, as a doctor, was compelled to undergo every year was undoubtedly beneficial for her; based on high-ega systems, the disciplines of Barbe Barber were courses of refreshment for brains and bodies for the medical fraternities of the world. Cyro looked younger and more vital than ever; Gerund told himself that, after six years of marriage, he was less a source of vitality in his wife's life than was high-ega; but it was irrational to hope for any change in that respect.

Walking together they reached the plane. Jeffy, their bonded servant, was leaning against the metal hull awaiting them, arms patiently folded.

"It's nice to see you again, Doctor Cyro," he said, opening the door for them and standing back.

"And you, Jeffy. You're looking brown."

"Baked right through," he said, smiling broadly. His homeland was a bleak northern island lying under frost most of the year; equatorial tour suited him well. Though it was thirty years since he had been brought from that distant land, Jeffy still spoke its simple patois, Ingulesh; he had been unable to acquire the Galingua in which Gerund, Cyro, and most civilized people of the day thought and conversed.

They climbed into their seats, Jeffy taking the pilot's throne. He was a great, slow man who moved like a boxer coming in for the kill. His sluggish mentality had left him fit for nothing but the role of a bonded servant, yet he handled the heavy flier with the delicacy of a cat killing a mouse.

Jeffy now taxied them over to one of the semi-circular take-off collars which would absorb their exhaust gases. The orange signal came through on the collar beacon and they burst immediately into vertical flight.

At once the trees and the white and grey walls of Barbe Barber dwindled away below them, as inconsiderable as a child's charade between the limitless sandwich of sky and sand. The plane headed due west, on a course which would bring them eventually to the Gyres' home in the Puterska Islands: or would have brought them there but for the sick man a thousand metres under the bland surface of the Lanic Sea-a sick man of whose very existence they were as yet unaware, "Well, Gerund, what has happened in the world since I've been out of it?" Gyro asked, settling herself carefully opposite her husband.

"Nothing very exciting. The Dualists wish to register every planet in the Federation. The Barrier Research City has been opened with due pomp. And the world of learning is at loggerheads over Pamlira's new work: 'Para-evolution'."

"I must certainly read that," Gyro said, with a trace of excitement. "What's his theory this time?"

"It's one of those things which doesn't summarize easily," Gerund told her, "but briefly Pamlira accepts the Pla-To position of the Dual Theory and claims that evolution is working towards greater consciousness.

Plants are less conscious than animals, animals less cons-cious than men, and men came after animals which came after the plants. Plants, animals, men, are only first steps in a long ladder. Pamlira points out that man is by no means fully conscious. He sleeps, he forgets, he is un-aware of the workings of his body"

"Which is why we doctors exist," Gyro inserted.

"Exactly. As Pamlira himself says, only certain un-usual individuals, a.s.sociated together into our present Orders of Medicine, can to some extent partic.i.p.ate con-sciously in somatic activity."

She smiled a neutral smile.

"And where does he go from there?" she asked.

"He postulates that the next evolutionary step would be something-a being-conscious in every cell: and that Nature may be already preparing to usher it on to the stage. The time, apparently, is ripe for the new being."

"Already?" She raised a quizzical eyebrow. "I should have thought he was a few million years early!

Have all the permutations of which man is capable been played through already?"

"Pamlira spends half the book explaining why the new species is due now," Gerund said. "According to him. evolution accelerates like scientific progress; the more protoplasm available for modification, the sooner the modification appears. On thirty thousand planets, you have quite a weight of protoplasm."

Cyro was silent. With a slight ache in his heart, Gerund noticed that she asked him nothing about his personal opinion of Pamlira's book, though it must have been clear from what he said that he had read it.